As the organisers say, “in the past two decades, biological knowledge has grown at an unprecedented rate, creating new disciplines such as systems biology [...] During this same period, ideas that belonged to the realm of speculation have reached maturity and are now the subject of articles and lectures.” In order to provide a review of current issues relating to Artificial Life, ECAL 2013 has invited biologists, engineers, physicists and mathematicians to share their thoughts on the current definition of what constitutes “life”.